First off, I'm blaming Hood for this. If it wasn't for him pointing me in the direction of this mill, I would of been happily on my way to building a nice desktop sized router!
Anyway, after Hood's help, a few months ago I became the owner of a Matchmaker mill. The actual knee mill is a Shizouka ST-N, with a Summit aka One Arm Bandit tool changer.
Shizouka ST-N by
mc_mtb, on Flickr
After removing the head, and with some questionable use of a forklift and some skates, it made it into the workshop.
In Position by
mc_mtb, on Flickr
I'm not in a great rush to get this machine up and running as I've got various other projects/jobs that have priority, but inbetween swapping bits in my lathe, I've been tracing wires, doing some cleaning, and getting the autolube up and running. After cleaning out the autolube unit, I filled it up and left it running overnight to see if any oil appeared on the ways. And despite managing to pump half a litre out the resevoir, nothing appeared anywhere it should, or even on the floor. The oil was finally located sitting in a recess under the table, which had a blocked drain hole, and was getting there because of a burst alloy pipe.
While having the ballscrew support of the end of the table, I stripped and cleaned the distribution block, and found two of the Bijur metering units are blocked, so I stripped the other distribution blocks, and found one more blocked on the knee, along with the main quill one. Buying some new metering blocks is on this weeks list of jobs.
Here's the distribution block refitted with a new copper pipe -
Autolube Distribution by
mc_mtb, on Flickr
As it stands, my plan is to use a Kflop with Kanalog running through Mach for the main control, with high voltage steppers and drivers for the axis running closed loop through the Kflop.
I'd like servos, but I can't justify the cost at the moment. 3 steppers and drivers are roughly the same cost as a servo for a single axis, so I'll live with the slowness of steppers for now, however by using the Kflop upgrading to servos later will be a pretty straightforward job.